Suggestions for the Installer (regarding network installs)

[Stephan Windischmann]

Recently, I installed the Fedora beta on my laptop to replace Debian
unstable, and since I'm not going to download 3 ISO's on my 128kbit
connection, I decided to try the netinstall using the 4MB boot.iso.

It seems as if the netinstall function is only there as an afterthought
(or maybe I'm just used to Debian).
Instead of a 4MB boot CD that has to download the installer itself, a
dedicated Fedora Netinstall CD (~100-150MB) that has the graphical
installer and perhaps a minimal file system on it would be really
helpful for those that don't want to get all 3 CD's.

Having to enter the FTP mirror details by hand isn't especially user
friendly either, and it doesn't really fit together with the rest of the
Fedora installer, which is excellent.

Also, would it be possible to do a netinstall of rawhide directly,
instead of having to first install the latest beta/release and then
upgrading to it? I'm a software version junky. ;)

Enough ramblings for now.

-windi

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le dim 12/10/2003 à 11:12, Stephan Windischmann a écrit :
>  Recently, I installed the Fedora beta on my laptop to replace Debian
>  unstable, and since I'm not going to download 3 ISO's on my 128kbit
>  connection, I decided to try the netinstall using the 4MB boot.iso.
>  
>  It seems as if the netinstall function is only there as an afterthought
>  (or maybe I'm just used to Debian). 
Netinstall is *old*. It's used by the kind of people who deeply despise
gfx effects so there has not been many calls to "enhance" it I think.

>  Instead of a 4MB boot CD that has to download the installer itself,
> a
>  dedicated Fedora Netinstall CD (~100-150MB) that has the graphical
>  installer and perhaps a minimal file system on it would be really
>  helpful for those that don't want to get all 3 CD's. 
I have a foggy memory of it only needing a few floppies in RH 5.2 time

>  Having to enter the FTP mirror details by hand isn't especially
> user
>  friendly either, and it doesn't really fit together with the rest of the
>  Fedora installer, which is excellent. 
This means you can use your own local intranet ftp serveur for network
installations, which is good(tm). How would you do it with debian ?

>  Also, would it be possible to do a netinstall of rawhide directly,
>  instead of having to first install the latest beta/release and then
>  upgrading to it? I'm a software version junky. ;) 
I think in theory you might, in the real world it's always a good idea
to start with a working system before rawhidizing it;). (don't be fooled
by rawhide current state - it's always gentler at beta time)

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 05:12, Stephan Windischmann wrote:
>  It seems as if the netinstall function is only there as an
> afterthought
>  (or maybe I'm just used to Debian).
>  Instead of a 4MB boot CD that has to download the installer itself, a
>  dedicated Fedora Netinstall CD (~100-150MB) that has the graphical
>  installer and perhaps a minimal file system on it would be really
>  helpful for those that don't want to get all 3 CD's. 
Actually, the rescuecd.iso can also be used for kicking off an install
and has all of the second stage.  Installing packages from FTP/HTTP with
the graphical installer is a new feature -- I'm guessing using the
rescuecd.iso to kick off an install will get more popular in the future
:-)  Graphical network installs in the past have been restricted to NFS
where you just loopback mount the second stage off the NFS mount and
don't have to do the large download.

>  Having to enter the FTP mirror details by hand isn't especially
> user
>  friendly either, and it doesn't really fit together with the rest of the
>  Fedora installer, which is excellent. 
The problem with this (historically) is the lack of an updated, reliable
mirror list in a location with the bandwidth to support being probed
during install.  There's also a slight problem with correlating what
your boot media matches to where to install from, but that's probably a
solvable technical problem if there was movement on the first.

>  Also, would it be possible to do a netinstall of rawhide directly,
>  instead of having to first install the latest beta/release and then
>  upgrading to it? I'm a software version junky. ;) 
We're looking at turning on installer images for rawhide.  I've been
reluctant to do so just because there are nights when things are broken
because of typos that don't catch them until the next day and then
having people file bugs for three days could be annoying, but we'll come
up with some way of dealing with that when it starts to become a problem
;-)

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Rudi Chiarito]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 10:34:18PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
>  Actually, the rescuecd.iso can also be used for kicking off an
> install
>  and has all of the second stage.  Installing packages from FTP/HTTP with 
On a related note, would you accept patches to create "USB boot images",
for kickstarting purposes? E.g. in a cluster you could dump floppies and
CDs altogether, booting installations from removable Flash storage (you
can still use USB floppy or CD drives if you really miss those long
startup times). Yes, you could as well set up nodes to boot from the
net, but some might prefer kickstart's kssendmac option to register an
Ethernet address (and enable DHCP/netboot for it afterwards).

I have been hacking the anaconda-runtime scripts to sneak a given
network driver onto the boot floppy. You need to take out the splash
screen to make room for the extra module - no problem, as it's for
headless systems anyway. It's not much more than an experiment, because
this way only the smallest modules can be crammed in. Not to mention
that floppies are slooooooow. Still, one might have legacy systems whose
BIOS can't boot from USB, so it's not necessarily a waste of time.

The real deal, though, is an image that basically combines bootdisk and
the driver disks. The 65MB of rescuecd.iso - at least in this case - are
overkill. Instead, with something of intermediate size, you could create
a small bootable partition for kickstart, while the rest of the drive is
used by a data partition.

>  We're looking at turning on installer images for rawhide. 
> I've been
>  reluctant to do so just because there are nights when things are broken
>  because of typos that don't catch them until the next day and then
>  having people file bugs for three days could be annoying, but we'll come
>  up with some way of dealing with that when it starts to become a problem
>  ;-) 
Here's a mostly harmless bug for you.

In mk-images::makeinitrd() you initialise INITRDMODULES, but proceed to
use LOADERMODULES.

Rudi

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2003-10-13 at 07:53, Rudi Chiarito wrote:
>  On Sun, Oct 12, 2003 at 10:34:18PM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
>  > Actually, the rescuecd.iso can also be used for kicking off an install
>  > and has all of the second stage.  Installing packages from FTP/HTTP with
>  
>  On a related note, would you accept patches to create "USB boot images",
>  for kickstarting purposes? E.g. in a cluster you could dump floppies and
>  CDs altogether, booting installations from removable Flash storage (you
>  can still use USB floppy or CD drives if you really miss those long
>  startup times). Yes, you could as well set up nodes to boot from the
>  net, but some might prefer kickstart's kssendmac option to register an
>  Ethernet address (and enable DHCP/netboot for it afterwards). 
I've thought about it -- I'm just not 100% convinced of the usefulness
of doing so (since it takes up another 4 or 5 megs on the first CD).  I
just got a USB pendrive over the weekend, so figured I'd at least look
at it.  Should basically require making a fs, copying the files from the
isolinux/ directory on the CD, mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg and then run
syslinux on the filesystem.  Or that would be my hope :-)

>  I have been hacking the anaconda-runtime scripts to sneak a given
>  network driver onto the boot floppy. You need to take out the splash
>  screen to make room for the extra module - no problem, as it's for
>  headless systems anyway. It's not much more than an experiment, because
>  this way only the smallest modules can be crammed in. Not to mention
>  that floppies are slooooooow. Still, one might have legacy systems whose
>  BIOS can't boot from USB, so it's not necessarily a waste of time. 
Unfortunately, this release is probably the last where floppies have any
relevance.  From 2.6 kernels so far, I really don't see how we're going
to be able to continue to have boot disks after moving to a 2.6 kernel.

[snip]

>  Here's a mostly harmless bug for you.
>  
>  In mk-images::makeinitrd() you initialise INITRDMODULES, but proceed to
>  use LOADERMODULES. 
Thanks, fixed.  Bugzilla helps in the future (to avoid losing things)

Cheers,

Jeremy

[Bryan White]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
>  Unfortunately, this release is probably the last where floppies have
> any
>  relevance.  From 2.6 kernels so far, I really don't see how we're going
>  to be able to continue to have boot disks after moving to a 2.6 kernel. 
This will be painful.  I have been setting up boxes with no CD and doing 
net installs from a floppy for a long time now.  I like the idea of a 
USB boot into a network install but I suspect some of the older boxes 
(4-500Mhz Era) will not boot from USB.

I picked up a USB keychain drive to do testing but never got it to the 
point where I could boot off of it.  Does anybody know of a recipe or 
howto for doing such a thing, particularly for booting into a 
RedHat/Fedora network install.

Alternatively, is there some way to create a floppy that would pull a 
boot image over the network?  It would have to have a selection of 
network drivers.  I have never looked into boot ROMs for NICs.  That 
sounds like overkill just to launch an install.

Bryan White

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mar 14/10/2003 à 13:13, Bryan White a écrit :
>  Jeremy Katz wrote:
>  > Unfortunately, this release is probably the last where floppies have any
>  > relevance.  From 2.6 kernels so far, I really don't see how we're going
>  > to be able to continue to have boot disks after moving to a 2.6 kernel. 
I do hope floppy kickstarting will still work;)

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

[Jesse Keating]

On Tuesday 14 October 2003 04:13, Bryan White wrote:
>  I have never looked into boot ROMs for NICs.  That
>  sounds like overkill just to launch an install. 
Actually it's not at all.  Network booting provides a very fast and 
efficient method of starting an installation.  Just a simple DHCP 
request, followed by a tftp connection to pull down a kenrel/initrd 
image provided on the first installation CD, and you're set.  We use 
syslinux as the boot loader, so we can have a nice kickstart menu where 
the installation techs just pick the type of system that they're 
installing and the kickstart will automagically start.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraLegacy)
Mondo DevTeam           (www.mondorescue.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
 
Was I helpful?  Let others know:
 http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating

[Tom Diehl]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Jesse Keating wrote:

>  On Tuesday 14 October 2003 04:13, Bryan White wrote:
>  > I have never looked into boot ROMs for NICs.  That
>  > sounds like overkill just to launch an install.
>  
>  Actually it's not at all.  Network booting provides a very fast and 
>  efficient method of starting an installation.  Just a simple DHCP 
>  request, followed by a tftp connection to pull down a kenrel/initrd 
>  image provided on the first installation CD, and you're set.  We use 
>  syslinux as the boot loader, so we can have a nice kickstart menu where 
>  the installation techs just pick the type of system that they're 
>  installing and the kickstart will automagically start. 
I love my pxe boot machines for the same reasons Jesse listed above. I do
not know how I lived without PXE. Expecially now that things do not fit on
a floppy. :-) Besides PXE is so much faster than a floppy ever could be.

On a slightly different note I have a few older machines that I would like
to setup for PXE booting but I need ROMs for them. Does anyone have a good
source for them? I have heard that there might be a floppy image available
for testing that you can later burn to a Eprom once you know it works. So
far I have not had much luck finding it though.

-- 
......Tom		Registered Linux User #14522	http://counter.li.org
tdiehl(a)rogueind.com	My current SpamTrap ------->	mtd123(a)rogueind.com

[Jared Smith]

On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 10:27, Tom Diehl wrote:
>  I love my pxe boot machines for the same reasons Jesse listed above.
> I do
>  not know how I lived without PXE. Expecially now that things do not fit on
>  a floppy. :-) Besides PXE is so much faster than a floppy ever could be. 
OK, I've been wanting to do PXE installations for a long time.  I can
get the machines to boot off off PXE, but I'm not sure where to go from
there.  (I've played around with it a little, and actually got the
kernel to boot, but not far enough to start the installer.)  Anybody got
some pointers and/or any documentation on how to do a PXE boot
installation?

Jared Smith

[Alan Cox]

>  OK, I've been wanting to do PXE installations for a long time.  I
> can
>  get the machines to boot off off PXE, but I'm not sure where to go from
>  there.  (I've played around with it a little, and actually got the
>  kernel to boot, but not far enough to start the installer.)  Anybody got
>  some pointers and/or any documentation on how to do a PXE boot
>  installation? 
If you are using pxelinux (throw the old intel pxe crap in the bitbucket its
just pain 8))

Edit /etc/dhcpd.conf. Set it up for dhcp as normal but also add

	next-server the-pxe-tftp-box-i-have;
	filename "/pxelinux.0"

for the host range, and make sure allow booting; is included in the top
section.

Edit /etc/xinetd.d/tftp. Enable tftp and make sure the server_args is
"-s /tftpboot" - this limits where the tftp can access.

Stick pxelinux.0 from syslinux into /tftpboot

Boot the pxe box and it should boot to a boot prompt but will fail to
load a kernel.

cp the initrd and kernel image from the first CD pxe directory into
/tftpboot. Now either set up a pxelinux.cfg (see docs) or at the prompt
type the kernelname initrd=initrdname

Its a godsend for saving time

[Jamie Oulman]

hpa has additional info on his syslinux site, 
	http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

pxe is really great for installs. i've been doing 
redhat installations with pxe/nfs for a couple of
months now and it's extremely nice not to need media.

just drop the isos in an nfs export somewhere and your 
all set.

-jamie

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 02:38:49PM -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
>  > OK, I've been wanting to do PXE installations for a long
> time.  I can
>  > get the machines to boot off off PXE, but I'm not sure where to go from
>  > there.  (I've played around with it a little, and actually got the
>  > kernel to boot, but not far enough to start the installer.)  Anybody got
>  > some pointers and/or any documentation on how to do a PXE boot
>  > installation?
>  
>  If you are using pxelinux (throw the old intel pxe crap in the bitbucket its
>  just pain 8))
>  
>  Edit /etc/dhcpd.conf. Set it up for dhcp as normal but also add
>  
>  	next-server the-pxe-tftp-box-i-have;
>  	filename "/pxelinux.0"
>  
>  for the host range, and make sure allow booting; is included in the top
>  section.
>  
>  Edit /etc/xinetd.d/tftp. Enable tftp and make sure the server_args is
>  "-s /tftpboot" - this limits where the tftp can access.
>  
>  Stick pxelinux.0 from syslinux into /tftpboot
>  
>  Boot the pxe box and it should boot to a boot prompt but will fail to
>  load a kernel.
>  
>  cp the initrd and kernel image from the first CD pxe directory into
>  /tftpboot. Now either set up a pxelinux.cfg (see docs) or at the prompt
>  type the kernelname initrd=initrdname
>  
>  Its a godsend for saving time
>  
>  
>  --
>  fedora-devel-list mailing list
>  fedora-devel-list(a)redhat.com
>  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 12:27, Tom Diehl wrote:

>  
>  On a slightly different note I have a few older machines that I would like
>  to setup for PXE booting but I need ROMs for them. Does anyone have a good
>  source for them? I have heard that there might be a floppy image available
>  for testing that you can later burn to a Eprom once you know it works. So
>  far I have not had much luck finding it though. 
Have you checked out Etherboot at http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/ ?
They include images for floppies that can be used in place of boot ROMs,
and they also provide boot ROM images.  Good stuff.

--Jeremy

[Janina Sajka]

I should think that one of the chief issues to resolve with network
installations should be the ability to resume. I've done many net
installs over my lan, and have even run into this issue there--as with a
portable going to sleep for some reason. So, if it can crop up in a
local environment, it should be even more important over the Internet,
imho.

Jeremy Katz writes:
>  From: Jeremy Katz <katzj(a)redhat.com&gt;
>  
>  On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 05:12, Stephan Windischmann wrote:
>  > It seems as if the netinstall function is only there as an afterthought
>  > (or maybe I'm just used to Debian).
>  > Instead of a 4MB boot CD that has to download the installer itself, a
>  > dedicated Fedora Netinstall CD (~100-150MB) that has the graphical
>  > installer and perhaps a minimal file system on it would be really
>  > helpful for those that don't want to get all 3 CD's.
>  
>  Actually, the rescuecd.iso can also be used for kicking off an install
>  and has all of the second stage.  Installing packages from FTP/HTTP with
>  the graphical installer is a new feature -- I'm guessing using the
>  rescuecd.iso to kick off an install will get more popular in the future
>  :-)  Graphical network installs in the past have been restricted to NFS
>  where you just loopback mount the second stage off the NFS mount and
>  don't have to do the large download.
>  
>  > Having to enter the FTP mirror details by hand isn't especially user
>  > friendly either, and it doesn't really fit together with the rest of the
>  > Fedora installer, which is excellent.
>  
>  The problem with this (historically) is the lack of an updated, reliable
>  mirror list in a location with the bandwidth to support being probed
>  during install.  There's also a slight problem with correlating what
>  your boot media matches to where to install from, but that's probably a
>  solvable technical problem if there was movement on the first.
>  
>  > Also, would it be possible to do a netinstall of rawhide directly,
>  > instead of having to first install the latest beta/release and then
>  > upgrading to it? I'm a software version junky. ;)
>  
>  We're looking at turning on installer images for rawhide.  I've been
>  reluctant to do so just because there are nights when things are broken
>  because of typos that don't catch them until the next day and then
>  having people file bugs for three days could be annoying, but we'll come
>  up with some way of dealing with that when it starts to become a problem
>  ;-)
>  
>  Cheers,
>  
>  Jeremy
>  
>  
>  --
>  fedora-devel-list mailing list
>  fedora-devel-list(a)redhat.com
>  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list 
-- 
	
Janina Sajka
Email: janina(a)rednote.net		
Phone: [phone]

Director, Technology Research and Development
American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)
http://www.afb.org

Chair, Accessibility Work Group
Free Standards Group
http://accessibility.freestandards.org

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2003-10-13 at 10:09, Janina Sajka wrote:
>  I should think that one of the chief issues to resolve with network
>  installations should be the ability to resume. I've done many net
>  installs over my lan, and have even run into this issue there--as with a
>  portable going to sleep for some reason. So, if it can crop up in a
>  local environment, it should be even more important over the Internet,
>  imho. 
Resume how exactly?  At this point, we handle every error condition I
know of and give a chance to retry at which point things start returning
to normal.  One of our QA guys even does things like put firewall rules
on servers to stop his install cases from being able to proceed
"normally" :-)

cheers,

Jeremy